the subjects flowing over the surfaces and overflowing
the proper boundaries very often; and also sins in using many woods of
very slightly different tones and textures, which will almost certainly
lose their reciprocal relation in the course of time, and thereby their
decorative effect. The ancient intarsias were made of a small number of
different woods, and the effect was kept simple; pear, white poplar,
oak, walnut, and holly almost exhaust the list; while even Roentgen's
work, in which he used a larger number of woods, including some of those
foreign trees which Dutch commerce made available for him, has suffered
from their changing and fading. I would advise the marqueteur to
disregard most of the many foreign woods now in the market, and content
himself with simple and well-proved effects for the most part, trusting
rather to beauty of design to give distinction to his work than to
variety of colour and startling effects of contrast.

[Illustration: Plate 54.--_Panel from S. Maria in Organo, Verona._

_To face page 126._]

It is the fashion at the present day to exhort the designer to found his
design upon the study of nature, which is right enough if accompanied by
discretion and a feeling for style. In many mouths, however, the
exhortation means that the copying of natural forms is advised, and
often, if one may judge from the examples which one sees around one,
without selection either of subject or form. Now it is obvious that it
is sometimes the beauty of form in natural objects which attracts the
eye, and sometimes the beauty or strangeness of colours, either in their
combination or from the unusual tint. And while the former quality
fits the object for translation into ornament, by means of
simplification and repetition, the latter is more likely to be the
suggestive starting point for the production of something quite
different than a factor in a directly-derived composition. Certain forms
of flowers and leaves are also suitable for ornament expressed in a
certain way, and when this harmony occurs the representation of nature
is satisfactory as ornament; but the reverse is very often shown to be
the case in work of a more modern type, in which the design is based on
the dictum that the copying of natural forms will produce ornament. It
is not the copying of natural forms, but the ordering of the spaces, the
arranging and balancing of line and mass, and the adaptation of means to
ends which produce satis